The uniqueness of this coin is its high level of anonymity. Unlike the popular Bitcoin, zcash transactions cannot be tracked due to the nature of the protocol used to create them.
The development of the cryptocurrency was carried out by the company Zerocoin Electric Coin , positioning it as the most likely competitor to Bitcoin. And there are reasons for these statements:
- the minimum unit is zatoshi, which is 10¯⁸ of the main ZEC coin;
- the total number of all coins that will be released into circulation is 21 million. Like Bitcoin, their supply is limited.
Unlike Bitcoin, the time required to form a block during mining is only 2.5 minutes, which is much less.
ZeroCash protocol was developed as an addition to the existing Bitcoin protocol, so it is not surprising that this coin gained popularity immediately after its entry into the cryptocurrency market.
According to the results of the first trading, the cost of Zcash was 3,200 bitcoins per 1 ZEC. But after the initial rise, there was a fall and now its value is steadily fluctuating at the level of $270 - $300 . The design and development of ZEC is carried out by an international group of cryptographers, who receive a percentage of the miners' income. In this way, the developers provided themselves with reliable “backs” that do not require an additional injection of funds or the organization of an ICO.
The anonymity of ZEC is due to the use of the zk-SNARK protocol, which implements the principle of zero-knowledge proof. When applied, either party (whether sending or receiving) has evidence that the transaction was completed, but does not have any information about the sender or recipient, as well as the amount of the transfer. Unlike other cryptocurrencies, whose transaction information is publicly available, Zcash users can hide data on the blockchain, depending on their preferences.
In addition to the above, it is worth noting the following advantages of ZEC:
- protection of coins from industrial mining. It is impossible (now, and according to the developers in the future) to create a specialized ASIC miner - mining is carried out only on video cards;
- ease of learning - from receiving to selling and exchanging;
- high reward - 90% to miners, 10% to developers.
- EWBF Zcash Miner
How to choose a video card for Zcash mining?
Unlike many cryptocurrencies that work effectively with AMD video cards, ZEC is best mined using NVIDIA cards. This is due to the presence of the Equihash algorithm and the EWBF mining program as the most productive combination, which work effectively on the cards of this particular manufacturer.
Naturally, it is worth taking into account the amount of RAM, its speed, and overclocking capabilities. The undisputed leader is the NVIDIA TITAN V video card, capable of delivering 884 Sol/s.
In general, when choosing a card, you can quite simply calculate the approximate profit based on the basic parameters:
- hash (performance) of the map;
- power consumption;
- mining difficulty;
- card cost;
- depreciation.
Rating of video cards for Zcash mining:
| Video card | Sol/s |
| NVIDIA TITAN V | 884 |
| NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080Ti | 630 |
| NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 | 470 |
| NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980Ti | 460 |
| NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 | 435 |
| AMD Radeon R9 390 | 380 |
| AMD Radeon R9 290X | 350 |
| NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 | 315 |
| NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 | 305 |
| AMD Radeon R9 Nano | 295 |
| NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 | 290 |
| AMD Radeon R9 290 | 285 |
| AMD Radeon RX 480 | 270 |
| AMD Radeon HD 7950 | 250 |
| AMD Radeon RX 470 | 200 |
| AMD Radeon R9 380 | 170 |
| NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050Ti | 155 |
| AMD Radeon R7 370 | 150 |
| NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 | 145 |
| NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 | 140 |
| AMD Radeon R7 360 | 100 |
| NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750Ti | 75 |
As mentioned above, Nvidia , but the AMD 470 and 480 models, popular among miners, are in the middle of the list. Yes, they work great on other currencies, for example with the CryptoNight algorithm, where they can reveal their potential, but for ZEC mining, Nvidia is beyond competition.
When choosing a card, you need to look not only at the amount of RAM, but also at its type. Thus, the 1080 and 1080Ti models differ in that in the first the RAM frequency is 10 GB/s versus 11 GB/s for the 1080 Ti model, and the bandwidth is 484 GB/s versus 320 GB/s. Video cards that use Samsung memory modules with high overclocking potential and the ability to change firmware are in demand.
When purchasing, you must also take into account the fact that the complexity of mining is constantly growing, so you should not limit yourself to the currently recommended 2-4 GB of video card RAM, but it is better to take it with a reserve of 6 or more.
Mystery
The special feature of the GTS 450 is the crystal. NVIDIA abandoned GF104
, on which
the GTX 460
, and developed a new processor - GF106. This is the same “improved” Fermi with 48 CUDA cores per SM block. In total, it has 4 SM units, 192 stream processors, 32 texture units and 16 rasterization engines.
In its standard version, the GF106 is 108 MHz faster than the GF104 and operates at 783 MHz. Stream processors operate at 1566 MHz instead of 1350 MHz, but the memory is at the same level as the GTX 460: 1 GB GDDR5 with a frequency of 3608 MHz. Only now it works not on a 256- or 192-bit bus, but on a 128-bit bus.
Pool selection
Almost all major pools provide the opportunity to mine Zcash. But what attracts one miner is not suitable for another. What parameters should be used to select the most suitable one?
First of all, you should pay attention to the technical characteristics:
- Ping. A capacious concept characterizing response time. The lower the ping, the faster the exchange of information with the pool occurs; accordingly, having approximately the same power, the winner will be the miner who sends the calculated block to the pool faster. For productive work, it is recommended to work with a pool whose ping time is no more than 50-60 ms. Ideally - 25-30 ms.
- Pool hashrate. The more power, the better. Especially if payments are made (or selected) using the PPLNS system, which implies a reward for the number of blocks found in accordance with how many shares were sent. The more miners are connected, the higher the power of the pool.
- Number of miners. The other side of the coin of pools with a high hash rate is if the distribution of profits is based on the principle of dividing profits evenly between participants.
- Commission, statistics. Less important, but playing a big role in receiving rewards. Serious pools charge no more than 2.5% commission. A good number of confirmed blocks suggests that you can make good money on this pool. A small number of participants will not allow you to effectively calculate confirmed blocks - there is no effect of accessing them.
Top 5 popular Zcash mining pools:
| Pool | Commission | Hashrate |
| Flypool | 1% | 60MH/s |
| Suprnova | 1% | 7MH/s |
| Nanopool | 1% | 8MH/s |
| Coinmine | 1% | 1.5MH/s |
| Dwarfpool | 1% | 680 KH/s |
| F2pool | 5% | 45 MH/s |
Flypool, Suprnova and Dwarfpool are very popular among miners due to their anonymity, low number of block losses, and the presence of an instant payout system. F2pool has an automatic payment system, but also the highest commission. Although, these are the only ones presented above that work with the PPS payment scheme, which is especially important for those who mine from time to time.
Possibilities
Zec Miner is controlled via the Windows command line. The miner does not have a graphical interface (GUI), and mining parameters can only be changed by entering commands manually. The full list of commands can be found by entering “-help”.
Among the interesting features, it is worth highlighting the control of the “intensity” of cryptocurrency mining, setting up reconnection to “dead” workers, as well as convenient switching between involved GPUs. For cards from NVIDIA, which are created on the Pascal architecture (GTX 10xx series), a set of additional parameters has been implemented. By the way, Zec Miner demonstrates the highest efficiency on them: their sols/s indicator exceeds the same indicator of universal miners by about 10-15%. The developer takes 2% of the total volume of mined cryptocurrency for himself. But this commission is compensated by the high mining speed.
The miner also has standard functions (settings for connecting to the pool and blockchain).
Mining on video cards
Below we have described methods of mining on video cards.
Solo mining
A method of mining coins using only our own capacities. The advantage of this method is the large reward when finding a block. There is no need to share with other miners. But it is worth considering that your own capacities must be comparable with the power of the network, since the complexity of production in the first year alone has increased 8 times and continues to grow. So, using a single card, for example, Nvidia 1070, the only block in a solo will be found within 2 years, which, of course, is unprofitable. And software developers say that the guide for solo mining of convicts has lost its relevance and advise using only pools for mining.
Dual mining
A method of mining two different coins at the same time. The advantage of this method is greater profitability due to less energy consumption. It is necessary to immediately make a reservation that this method is only available if mining is carried out using the Equihash and Ethash algorithms. Thus, it is possible to mine Ethereum and Zcash at the same time.
For dual mining, Claymore's Dual Miner software is used - the only client that can adequately work in two currencies. It is quite easy to configure, and its configuration file is completely translated into Russian. As an additional option, you can configure remote control of the miner.
Number two
In addition to the reference sample, we tested an overclocked version of the card, Leadtek WinFast GTS 450 Extreme
. Its processor operates at a frequency of 850 MHz, the thread cores run at 1700 MHz, and the cooling is more serious: the radiator now has two copper heat-conducting tubes.
The GTS 450 has few competitors. AMD only has the Radeon HD 5750
, NVIDIA itself has an ancient, but still nimble
GeForce GTS 250
, in its youth
9800 GTX+
.
All cards were tested using a shortened program. There was synthetics – 3DMark Vantage
with
Unigine Heaven Benchmark 2.0
- and the games
Resident Evil 5
,
Devil May Cry 4
and
Aliens vs.
Predator _ We set the graphics in them to maximum, but brought the anti-aliasing only to 2x.
Miner programs for mining Zcash
There are many miner programs for different cryptocurrencies. Below we have described the most popular miner programs for the Zcash cryptocurrency.
EWBF Zcash Miner
The program is designed exclusively to work with Nvidia video cards and allows you to maximize its potential during mining.
Attention: there are quite a lot of different descriptions and reviews of the EWBF miner on the network, which provide download links. And some unscrupulous owners of such resources post a miner that sends “hard-earned” funds to a third-party wallet, or “leaks” information about existing ones.
The miner itself is downloaded as an archive and is a set of files: executable and configuration. There is no installation in the usual form. For configuration, a file with a .bat extension is used, which must be created before the first launch, or an existing one must be modified.
Basic settings of the configuration file:
- miner - command to launch the program itself;
- server — address of the server (pool) that will be used for zcash mining;
- port — port number;
- user — username or zcash wallet number, depending on which pool is used;
- pass — password (if necessary).
It should be noted that many ZEC mining pools operate in anonymous mode, such as the nanopool. The passphrase for them can be any, but cannot be missing, otherwise the program will generate an error.
After saving the configuration, it is launched by double-clicking on the created (modified) .bat file.
Claymore zcash miner
Designed to work with AMD video cards. Unlike Claymore, Dual Miner does not work with two cryptocurrencies at the same time - you need to pay attention to this during installation.
To use, you need to unpack the client to any convenient place, and then make the necessary settings in the configuration file:
- zpool — address of the pool used for mining (example for nonopul: ssl://zec-eu1.nanopool.ogr: 6655);
- zwal — wallet address to which the payment will be made. Here you can also specify the name of the worker in order to track statistics on the pool;
- zpsw - passphrase, if required. During anonymous mining, any value is assigned, but must not be absent.
Claymore Zcash Miner has a large number of additional settings, which are activated by entering additional keys into the configuration file:
- allpools - use of default pools;
- di - use all GPUs;
- ftime - pool switch;
- WD — miner shutdown by event;
- r — restart the miner according to condition;
- dbg - keep a debug log;
- li — load reduction mode;
- tt - temperature control, etc.
The number of keys is very large; their complete list can be found on thematic forums, where the intricacies of mining using this software are discussed.
The miner is closed source, so it is difficult to track changes made by the developer. The developer's commission is, depending on the version, 2 or 2.5%. This should be taken into account when checking statistics.
Benchmark tests
3DMark Cloud Gate GPU: 12447
Better than AMD FirePro W4190M, but worse than NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M.
3DMark Cloud Gate Standard Score: 10231
Better than NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M, but worse than NVIDIA GeForce GT 755M.
3DMark Fire Strike Graphics: 1545
Better than AMD Radeon 530, but worse than NVIDIA GeForce 840M.
3DMark Fire Strike Score: 1463
Better than AMD Radeon R7 M445, but worse than NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M.
3DMark Vantage P: 9757.5
Better than NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M, but worse than Intel Iris Graphics 550.
3DMark01: 51783
Better than NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580, but worse than NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680.
3DMark06: 16033.5
Better than Intel Iris Graphics 550, but worse than NVIDIA GeForce GTX 850M.
3DMark11P: 2095.5
Better than NVIDIA GeForce 830M, but worse than AMD Radeon R7 M260X.
3DMark11P GPU: 1887.5
Better than AMD Radeon R7 M265, but worse than AMD Radeon R7 M260.
Octane Render OctaneBench: 15
Better than NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560M, but worse than NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760M.
Passmark: 1309
Better than AMD Radeon R7 M465, but worse than AMD FirePro M5950.
How to start mining (instructions)
In order to start mining Zcash you need to:
- install the necessary drivers and configure the equipment;
- create a wallet (both official and on any of the web services, or on the exchange);
- download and configure the software;
- if necessary, change the operating system settings;
- select a mining pool;
- run the program.
The use of appropriate drivers is one of the most important conditions for the correct (and even possible) operation of a video card for mining. So, some video cards only work with a certain version of drivers:
- AMD R9 series and earlier ones require 15.12;
- AMD RX 400 - work correctly only with versions 16.9 and 16.10;
- AMD RX 500 - with the latest versions;
- All NVIDIA cards require the appropriate latest driver, which can be downloaded from the official support page.
The official Zcash wallet is only available for installation on Linux systems, so for Windows systems the only option is to use web services or hardware wallets such as Cryptonator or Trezor. When installing an official wallet, you must remember that it requires about 10Gb of free space to work.
The software has been discussed above, so there is no need to repeat it. It is enough to indicate that:
- EWBF Zcash Miner is used for NVIDIA cards;
- Claymore Zcash Miner - for AMD cards;
- Claymore Dual Miner - for simultaneous mining of two cryptocurrencies.
When setting up your computer, you need to change some of its parameters:
- disable sleep mode;
- change the paging file size to a fixed value of 16 GB;
- disable automatic updates;
- If you have anti-virus programs, add folders with the miner to exceptions.
Since pools have already been mentioned, it is only worth noting that the flypool and nanopool are the most popular. To configure their use, there is an official page where you can select the necessary equipment and copy the corresponding configuration settings for the program’s batch file.
System requirements
Let's start with the fact that absolutely all versions of the Zcash miner EWBF are designed for video cards from NVIDIA. This means that if you have AMD chips, then you should look for another program.
The GPU memory must be at least 1 gigabyte. As for the hardware itself, it must support Compute Capability 2. At the moment, the program is available only for two operating systems - Windows and Linux. Please note that only a 64-bit version of the software has been developed.
Zcash AMD GPU-miner – Claymore`s program.
Zcash Mining Difficulty
The hash rate of the network and the difficulty of mining grew throughout 2022, while the difficulty of calculating a block remained the same, which made it possible to keep its calculation time at the same level. The trend decreased slightly at the end of the year, but during February-March 2018 it increased by almost one and a half times. And if in January the difficulty was about 7 M, then in March it was slightly less than 10 M, which indicates a new wave of interest in this currency.
Due to the increased number of participants, income on most pools has fallen by 15-20%, there has also been a decrease in the number of daily payments and an increase in the time required for withdrawal.
In light of the fact that the interest of miners in the Zclassic currency is decreasing, and the majority is moving to mining Zcash, the speed and complexity will increase proportionally (as well as the price), and accordingly, the payback time of the video card (farm) will increase.
zec miner versions
EWBF has come a long way to improve. The first release – zec miner 0.0.1 appeared in 2016.
The developers did not stop there and began to constantly update the software.
The release of zec miner 0.3, which appeared in early 2022, was especially successful among crypto enthusiasts.
By mid-2022, version zec miner 0.3 b appeared, and by the end of the year – 0.3.4 b. The latest version includes several improvements. Thus, the mining speed has been increased by 2%. The functionality of zec miner 0.3.4b has added the ability to set the mining intensity, and also improved mining statistics.
go
Profitability calculator
In order to calculate the profitability of mining, you can use online services that will show the approximate profit.
The most frequently used service is Wattomine.com. In order to use this calculator, you need to go to https://wattomine.com/coins, where you select the cryptocurrency algorithm. For Zcash, this is Equihash, deselect the rest by clicking, enter the number of cards in the farm in the appropriate field or fields, if cards of different types are combined into the farm.
Cryptocompare.com, Coinwartz.com, Red-miner.com are several more similar services that allow you to automatically calculate your approximate profit. Some, for example, Red Miner, require manual input of the hashrate and the cost of electricity.
Statistics show that the profit calculated using a calculator differs from real indicators, so this data can be used to find out the capabilities of the equipment, as well as the directions for choosing the type of currency for mining.
Detective
The reference GTS 450 showed very good results. On a 22-inch monitor you can comfortably play any project, be it DX10 or DX11. Of course, you will have to do without anti-aliasing, PhysX and 3D Vision, but the settings can be set to maximum - the GTS 450 can handle it.
competitors : Radeon HD 5750
it is the same, but the GTS 450 loses 11%. The slightly cheaper top-end 9800 GTX+ (GTS 250) three years ago is inferior by 3-9% in DX10 games.
With the overclocked version, you can think about a 24-inch monitor - a 10% increase will ensure proper performance. You will have to pay about 700 rubles extra for this.
If you are thinking about replacing your old GeForce 9600
or
GT220
, then the GTS 450 will come in handy. If you bought a GTS 250 at one time, then you should run for the new GTS 450 just for the sake of DX11 support. Well, if you’re just thinking about building a computer for gaming as cheaply as possible, then the GTS 450 is a smart solution: thanks to it, even with high settings you can play on a large monitor.
Cloud mining Zcash
Cloud mining allows you to get by with the power provided by the service. The most popular are Hashflare and Genesis-Mining. The advantage of cloud mining is that there is no need to spend money on buying and assembling a farm, paying for electricity, or setting up software.
The payback period for Zcash cloud mining is at least 4-6 months , depending on the chosen tariff plan, as well as the growth trend of the currency itself. You cannot count on a shorter interval, unless there is a sharp jump in cost.
To start mining in the cloud, you need to register, select the required tariff plan, hash rate, and make a payment. Payment is possible both from a card and using cryptocurrencies - Bitcoin. In the future, use part of the mined funds to pay for the contract.
